Elusive Music

Lexington Minuteman newspaper: Spindrift Commissioning Guild supports new music

2012-01-25T08:38:00.000-08:00

This week, my local newspaper had an article about the Spindrift Commissioning Guild and fundraiser. Read all about it!
Spindrift Commissioning Guild supports new music

The Guild's RocketHub fundraiser ends Friday January 27. 3 more days! Please donate, if you can, and support two new compositions for two Massachusetts chamber ensembles.

Meet the Musicians - Ashley Addington

2012-01-08T10:01:00.000-08:00

Ashley Addington, the upper voice of the Addington/Arnold flute-and-cello duo, is a flute performer and teacher north and west of Boston. She is originally from Austin, Texas.

Last year she played with the Neponset Valley Philharmonic, the Orchestra of Indian Hill, Sound Icon, Simon Sinfonietta, and the Callithumpian Consort. I definitely notice the emphasis on new music.

In the Addington/Arnold Duo, they play music on the cutting edge and newer, with pieces by Elliott Carter, Kaija Saariaho, Villo-Lobos and plenty of premieres and repeat performances of New England composers. Composers, like me, especially like those repeat performances. It means the players do like the music!

Her web site is http://www.ashleyaddington.com. Check out her performance calendar and a live recording of her playing Takemitsu’s Toward the Sea.

Her teaching resume is extensive and impressive -- lots of summer festivals, as well as studio teaching during year. She directs Flute Choirs at Indian Hill and Nashua.

She’s also a crafter - another compatibility with her duo partner Rachel Arnold and lives in Somerville.

Thank you, Ashley, for being a performer for my Commissioning Guild project this year!

Readers, you can be part of the Guild and support this new music. On January 10, there are 18 days left. Donate at RocketHub now!

Meet the Musicians - Rachel Arnold

2012-01-06T09:22:00.000-08:00

Rachel Arnold ( Photo by Cara Brostrom)

I met Rachel Arnold and Ashley Addington a year ago at a big Vortex concert in Cambridge, MA. They played a dynamic performance of Elliott Carter’s 'Enchanted Preludes'. They’ve played lots of new music, including music by Guild member and composer Charles Turner. They play a premiere every time I see them.

Last May, Rachel played a beautiful performance of my solo cello piece Soliloquy at an Advent Church Library concert, curated by Matt Samolis (also a Guild member supporting my collaboration with Rachel and Ashley). We had a musically expressive and lovely rehearsal in my living room. I was frustrated to miss the concert, but a family emergency kept me away.

Rachel is also an amazing yoga person and instructor. She’s got some elegant photos on her web site combining cello and yoga -- so much more flexible than I am! Check out http://www.ladyraycello.com. You’ll also find her concert calendar there.

I love Rachel’s little sculptures and jewelry that she makes out of polymer clay and other materials. She’s a whimsical and clever artist with many colorful and funny creations. Last year, she sold her work on Etsy as a fundraiser for Haiti. Read more about it on her blog http://ladyraycello.blogspot.com/

Thank you, Rachel, for being a participant in my music-writing for 2012!

Donate to Spindrift Commissioning Guild 2012 on RocketHub to support our collaboration. Today, January 6, there are 22 days left.
Thank you, all!

Be a Santa Claus for new music

2011-12-21T08:56:00.000-08:00

Crowd funding -- it’s a great way for everybody who loves new music to support making more of it.

I’ve got a crowd funding campaign going right now, Spindrift Commissioning Guild: Duo and Trio, for two new pieces for two Massachusetts chamber ensembles. It’s a RocketHub campaign, with fiscal sponsorship from Fractured Atlas (making contributions tax-deductible, which is a good bonus to help in promoting the campaign).

But, when I mention it to people who aren’t creatives themselves, most have never heard of crowd funding. I thought Kickstarter was pretty well-known, but it seems that’s only among other artists, performers, and composers.

The big non-profits have well-funded campaigns to get us all to give money. Public radio has an all-too-familiar model, and they guilt-trip us regularly. Other charities with lots of name recognition fill my mailbox with solicitations.

But what if I want to support a friend’s creation? Well, I probably can’t fund a whole commission or recording session. That’s usually too much to ask of just one supporter. So what about a commissioning group? You could get together with other fans that you know and offer to support a particular project, specifying your own theme, or on a theme planned by the artist.

Maybe you don’t know a group of fans with money to spare. One way to find artists’ projects that are already planned, are the crowd-funding web sites. Crowd funding web sites let the artist -- composer, performer, all types of artists -- set up a project with perks or premiums, just like the big charities. You can find projects on websites like Kickstarter, RocketHub, IndieGoGo, and one I just discovered - USA Projects.

So, audience members, music lovers, fans, you too can support the creation, performance and recording of new music. Crowd funding makes it easy to band together, with power in numbers, to fully support new musical creations. Be a Santa Claus for new music!

If you go directly to these web sites, finding a project that you like can be time-consuming. The usual way that you learn about projects is because you are on the mailing list of the artist. That limits the ability of the artist to get the word out, so I thought I’d make a list of projects looking for funding now that might interest the new-music supporter.

On USA Projects:
Ann Millikan : Rio Abstract
Bang On a Can : Field Recordings
Justin Merritt : Anupubbasikkhā

On Kickstarter:
Orlando Cela : Recording of compositions using extended techniques - funding ends today
BMOP Sound : Recording Concertos by Thomas Oboe Lee
Swede & Amber record voice & guitar music of John Duarte

On RocketHub:
Deanna Witkowski: This is NOT "jazzy Chopin"
Spindrift Commissioning Guild : Duo and Trio, new chamber music by Pamela Marshall (that’s me)

If you’ve got a project out there needing funding, please add a comment about it.

This year, next year, always, be a Santa Claus for new music!

Finding my way around the social web

2011-12-18T07:27:00.000-08:00

Since I've realized the music-career necessity of getting plugged in to the social web, I'm discovering the Internet all over again. But how can anyone keep up with it all? So more tools...

I found a neat Firefox browser plugin called "Morning Coffee" -- add the sites I want to keep track of on specific days of the week, open the tabs all at once and proceed through them to get caught up. I use Facebook more, see my friends' posts, network more on LinkedIn, and I'm finally taking a look at Twitter. It feels more efficient, especially since I can then feel finished and move on to writing some music -- something I was having a hard time doing.

I don't really get Twitter yet. If you have any tips on how to get more out of it, please let me know! I did discover some more people/entities to follow just by searching for "classical music." One was a newspaper, the contemporary classical daily. (It's a paper.li site, another type of platform for content aggregation.) So I added it to Morning Coffee, and I'll see if it stays interesting.

What about a Sunday morning reading list? Like New Music Box, Sequenza 21, Boston Musical Intelligencer, The Rest Is Noise. What else? That's a lot of reading!

And I'd like to mention... I'm offering some nice perks in exchange for your donation in support of "Duo and Trio", composing and recording two new chamber music compositions. Visit Spindrift Commissioning Guild at Rocket Hub and donate now! Thanks!

Performer Photo Gallery #2

2011-12-17T08:14:00.000-08:00

Another gallery of some of my favorite performers, in action, or waiting for action backstage:
Zenfolio Photo Gallery

Help me promote my Spindrift Commissioning Guild 2012 project for some more favorite performers. DUO & TRIO: CHAMBER MUSIC WITH FLUTE
For your donation, there are great perks, and tax-deductible too. Tell you friends!
RocketHub fundraising December-January http://www.rockethub.com/projects/4144

Learn more about the Spindrift Commissioning Guild.

Spindrift Commissioning Guild 2012 Fundraising Campaign

2011-12-01T08:00:00.000-08:00

This week, I'm launching a fund-raising campaign for Spindrift Commissioning Guild. I've got two projects for 2012:

1 music for the Addington-Arnold Duo (flute & cello)
2 music for the trio of Alan Yost, percussion, Shaylor Lindsay, piano & Sarah Tomasek, flute

We've got 60 days to put the fundraiser over the top, supporting the creation and recording of these new works. Check out my video on RocketHub, and donate if you can -- early and often! Thank you for your encouragement and support.
http://www.rockethub.com/projects/4144

PS Donations are tax-deductible as allowed by law, thanks to fiscal sponsorship by Fractured Atlas.

"Polluted" Soundscapes

2011-11-11T09:51:00.000-08:00

It's hard to find spots to record nature soundscapes that don't have some kind of traffic -- planes, highways, motorboats. If it's distant enough, I might barely notice the distant drones. A recording makes it much more obvious.

I haven't scientifically tested this but I think both microphone focus and psychology create this effect. Psychologically, we have a natural ability to focus on what we're trying to hear and we filter out the extraneous sounds, as long as they don't drown out what we're trying to hear. Later, when we listen to the recording, the recording itself is the object of our listening and we hear all the sounds at a more equal level. At the technical level, depending on the type of microphone, There's also a telescoping effect that brings out the distant, less desired sounds.

Truth Becoming in concert in Miami

2011-11-07T07:31:00.000-08:00

The South Beach Chamber Ensemble, directed by Michael Andrews, is performing my string quartet Truth Becoming in the Miami area this year. Check out this review of a fine concert! South Florida Classical Review

You can hear it again in Miami on November 15: concert schedule for South Beach Chamber Ensemble

Photo gallery of some favorite performers

2011-11-04T06:01:00.000-07:00

Sometimes days go by and my life as a composer involves very little composing. I also like working with Photoshop and have a huge repository of unprocessed photos. A couple of weeks ago, I spent some time organizing and ...

I realized I had a treasure trove of unused pictures of concerts and musician friends. So now, after a bit more organizing, you can check out this photo gallery of some of my favorite performers. Zenfolio is the web service that hosts the gallery. Adobe Lightroom is the tool I used to organize and to crop and adjust exposures.

http://honeycreeper.zenfolio.com/performerprotraits

Singing Machines Part 3

2011-10-28T04:43:00.000-07:00

Reminiscing... I was hiking the Monadnock-Sunapee trail on an August Saturday near our cabin on a New Hampshire lake. I was in the woods at least a quarter mile away from shore and I could hear the motorboats, making endless circles around the lake. It was my homing beacon, better than any compass. I could hear that I was heading in the right direction, back to the lake.

Weekdays are quieter. Maybe then I could get lost.

Singing Machines Part 2

2011-10-14T04:40:00.000-07:00

The propeller of the little 9-row airplane that flies from Phoenix to Flagstaff Arizona hums low, the fan warbles at a mid-range pitch, and then the whole plane shakes like the butt-kickers at the IMAX theater as we take off.

As we rise higher, the puddle-jumper thrums a pumping pulse about 60 beats/minutes until it levels out at a steady higher pitch. Then the overhead compartments rattle and buzz loudly. Quite a drum set.

After the plane lands, all the phones make their little startup calls. Unlike birds, they’re not talking to each other.

Singing Machines Part 1

2011-10-05T06:29:00.000-07:00

It’s a cool August morning at our cabin. The quartz heater next to me plays a perfect fourth over and over as the thermostat switches from low to high and back again.

A tractor-trailer truck makes an eerie whistling glissando as it speeds downhill on I-89 near the welcome center in Vermont. Was it a load of pipes that became a giant multiphonic flute?

When the leaves fall in autumn, the nearby highway gets louder -- constant, but subtly changing wall of noise. When they resurfaced the road a while back, it was louder still with tires roaring on the temporary grooved surface.

Electronic Musician - Why I’m dissatisfied

2011-10-03T07:32:00.000-07:00

There’s a lot of reasons why I don’t like the new Electronic Musician, recently merged with EQ magazine. The Profile section is many pages, covering musicians who I don’t know in styles I don’t listen to, and they’re almost all guys. I didn’t do a statistical survey, but in the October 2011 issue, there’s a 2-page picture feature of a woman guitarist with a paragraph of comment describing her band’s style. There are 4 women writers with short columns and one of the shortest features, and the editor is a woman. But the majority of features, technical articles, and gear coverage are by and about guys.

There’s less coverage of various musical styles. For bands I haven’t heard of, the writer may not give a genre label or description of their style, assuming you know. As a classical and sometimes electroacoustic musician I know I’m not they’re target audience, but the technical-digital audio half of my brain always got something out of reading the mag. I used to tear out insightful or technically interesting articles to save. Now, most of the short columns are less technical. When I’ve read the new mag, I’m done with it.

When I open the new EM to a random page, I always seem to get the profile pages, not the short one-pagers that used to give me new musical and production ideas -- the profiles are half the magazine, after all. In October, there are 60 pages of intro and profiles, 20 pages of gear, 28 pages in the “Learn” section - tutorials and tips columns. Throughout, most of the right-hand pages are ads. I don’t like the pseudo-clever label “Lust” for the gear and software section. I don’t even like the wider size; it doesn’t fit in my magazine piles neatly. Kvetch, kvetch.

I did read the whole mag, and there’s still some value in it. I listened to clips on iTunes of the featured bands. I got a few ideas of things to try in the home studio, like checking out more of my own sample library and trying some loops - not my usual modus operandi. I liked the column on career-development collaboration, although it was refresher info, not new. Not enough value to make me forget the problems though.

I unsubscribed from Keyboard because they “went back to basics”, i.e. dumbed it down and there wasn’t that much interesting left. Now I’m not sure I want Electronic Musician either.

Two new pieces of music - Resonances and Zoa

2011-08-11T08:14:00.001-07:00

Resonances is a new publication in the Spindrift Music Catalog: for alto sax, trumpet, 2 trombones, 2 percussion. Check out the score preview or listen to the the audio demo: a performance from 1999. I don’t know why it took me so long to make this piece available. I guess there was no urgency; it’s an odd instrumentation to get together and I didn’t know anyone who wanted to play it. But I do love this piece and I hope someone out there will pick it up and put in on some more concerts!

My newly completed musical composition, Zoa, is set for its premiere September 23 on the Advent Church Library concert series in Boston, Massachusetts. I wrote it for “2”, the flute&harp duo of Peter Bloom and Mary Jane Rupert. Its name “Zoa” refers to William Blake’s mythological poem “The Four Zoas” and the Greek word meaning “living one”.

Form in Music and Nature

2011-07-27T08:58:00.000-07:00

Form in Music was the title of my college music theory textbook. Form gives music its shape. The music is paced in the moment by the tempo, but the larger shape is made by passages that repeat and develop, by the musical events that interject and interrupt and flow into each other, and how the music builds to some kind of climax of complexity, of loudness, of glorious or dreadful feeling.

A couple of weeks ago, in the morning, I sat on a high porch by a quiet lake. The breeze was beginning to rise and the kingfishers were rattling to each other along the shore. I had slept through the early morning of bird activity. I heard repeating musical phrases from various birds across the stage around me, but there was no development or general buildup or climactic moments that hour. The musical form of nature’s soundscape is on a larger time scale. It’s full of repetition and variation, but in our normal listening time spans, there’s usually no development and climax in each 5 minute or 30-minute listening period, although as animals pass through there may be some interjected event with a flurry of audible activity. The arrival of a thunderstorm is definitely a climactic moment!

The soundscape is full of repetition and variation, but there doesn’t seem to be development and climax if we listen for just a little while. However, if we compare different parts of the day, we can hear different levels of activity that vary in the complexity of audible interactions.

When I woke in the perfectly still night, there were just a few sounds: distant hoots of two owls on opposite shores, occasional sproings of green frogs (but no bull frogs; they’re still missing since the 2009 fall drawdown of the lake). Then I heard the wild calls of 2 or 3 loons. The still water meant the sound echoed off the hills like a large resonant cathedral: clear, not loud. It was the climax of the gentle night music, not grandiose or loud or complex, but unique, strange, otherworldly. I only heard it for 2 or 3 minutes, then no more.

If each 24-hour day is like a symphony, then the night is the long meditative slow music that continues attacca into the finale, the complex texture of a multitude of birds at dawn. The rest of the day interweaves human activity and nature, with nature’s sounds often taking a back seat. Is the early evening the symphony’s scherzo, with peepers and insects and last calls of day birds?

Nature’s soundscape has a yearly cycle too, although in our buttoned-up houses and with earbuds in our ears when we go out, we may be missing it. If you stop the electronic input and listen to the sounds around you, what do you hear? Is there any of nature’s soundscape left where you are? Are your nights quiet with gentle sounds breaking the silence or full of buzzing insects? Are there meditative moments or excited climaxes in the sounds around you?

Listen to some of my nature soundscape recordings made in Costa Rica and the Florida Everglades.

Marketing a new Choral Piece

2011-07-07T08:21:00.000-07:00

New choral music for Christmas, arrangements of unusual Christmas songs, seems like an easy sell. Doesn't every choral director need something fresh for the regular December concert?

I have a soft spot for obscure Christmas songs, and I was quite taken with Carols and Lullabies by Conrad Susa when I first heard it on the same program with Britten's Ceremony of Carols. (Here's another Massachusetts chorus doing the Britten/Susa program.) Right away, I wanted to my own set of carols with harp. My set "Shepherds and Angels" includes a prelude and 9 songs: early New England and Appalachian songs, both earthy, energetic revivalist singing and the most tender and gentle lullabies. I added a violin for some fiddling flavor.

So how do I get the word out to all the choral directors who need music like this? The 200+ postcards and 300+ emails I sent are just a drop in the bucket. There is also the ChoralNet forum, which includes a community of composers. From that effort, I've arranged two performances and I hope there will be more.

The Mastersingers will give the eastern Massachusetts premiere and Geneva College will premiere it in Pennsylvania.

Listen to the demo of "Shepherds and Angels" and tell me what you think. (Scroll down to the Audio heading. No words - it's computer-generated. You can follow along in the PDF score as you listen.)

Do you know a chorus that might be interested? If you sing in or direct a chorus, is it too hard or too easy for your group?

Is "Shepherds and Angels" programming you need for your local Christmas concert?

Versions of Pipe Dreams

2011-07-02T07:16:00.000-07:00

I was searching for an album name for a collection of computer-generated tunes by the Spindrift Virtual Ensemble. They have the feel of fantasy landscapes to me, so I settled on the name Pipe Dreams. Then I thought I'd search to see what else has used that name. Every evocative word has already been used, many times over, right?

What I discovered: Animusic's Pipe Dream, an awesome computer-game-like video in 3D of balls spouting up to strike various musical surfaces, making happy, laugh-out-loud music.

Vortex debut CD

2011-06-24T08:15:00.000-07:00

THE VORTEX Series for New and Improvised Music is a fascinating concert series organized by Todd Brunel, clarinetist and improviser. I had the honor of working on the debut CD, doing the mastering and graphic design, and I also play horn on one of the tracks. All the performances are live improvisations from Vortex concerts, with a few edits. I just love all the music on this CD! -- energetic, sometimes subtle, sometimes insistent, melodic, noisy, and musically intriguing.

Our CD release party is June 26, 2011. Check out the announcement here on the Vortex blog. Come out and celebrate with us!

The Vortex CD on CDBaby

Shepherds and Angels for chorus

2011-05-20T07:34:00.001-07:00

Shepherds and Angels is a new choral piece that I wrote last fall. It's got several American Christmas songs arranged for SATB (soprano,alto,tenor,bass), violin, harp, and tamborine. I think it's a great addition to the harp-based Christmas repertoire, with an emphasis on Appalachian and New England tunes.

I'm looking for choruses who might like to program it for Christmas 2011. I have a lead for an eastern Massachusetts premiere. Anyone else out there who would like to be part of the premiere season?

Check out the list of tunes, get a score and hear an audio demo at www.spindrift.com. Contact me if you'd like a CD or printed perusal score.

Be in touch and tell me what you think of the music!

Does making art engender hope? Or does hope cause artists to create?

2011-04-21T17:22:00.000-07:00

I’m not accustomed to giving speeches, but yesterday I collaborated with two colleagues, poet Regie Gibson and visual artist Sirarpi Heghinian Walzer, to present a convocation at Fisher College. We speechified; we performed poetry with piano accompaniment; we displayed visual art on easels and projected large on the stage. Our topic was collaboration, how we’ve collaborated with other artists to create art, what it means to employ artistic thinking, and how artists are involved in social action. Our broader message was that thinking like an artist -- questioning, examining, digesting, remaking -- was an important tool for everyone and our society needs more of that if we’re going to get out of the binds we’re in. Creative thinking and innovation -- we need it all across society. Examining and questioning -- how else can we make sense of all the information and pseudo-facts being thrown at us.

I’ve been waiting a long time for our country to take a leadership role in addressing pollution, habitat destruction, loss of biodiversity, and especially -- top threat of all -- climate change. When those are the issues that I find most threatening, I thought hard about one of the questions posed to us: that our presentation showed as hopeful people, so does hope come first and then we make art, or does making art bolster our sense of hope. I wasn’t sure what to say, because right now, I’m not too hopeful about our prospects for keeping a natural world full of wonder and diversity. So the answer has to be, by creating art, I become more hopeful. I need for my art to be positive. There is no other way. Art for me is a message about a hopeful future, about I future I want to imagine.

Two of the poems we read were adaptations of my choral pieces, Weaving the World and The Future of Life. One contrasts a distant war with a refuge in nature. The other laments the loss of biodiversity, with the potential for making the world a sterile, man-made environment. Both end with hope, that fear of war can be overcome, that nature inspires us to appreciate our world, that people will come to realize that by protecting nature we preserve our own humanity. Creating art does engender hope.

Vortex, IAWM, Yellowstone

2010-11-27T08:08:00.000-08:00

It's been way too long since I wrote in my blog. A lot went on over the summer, including a Vortex Other Dimension improv workshop and concert back in July, organized by fabulous clarinetist Todd Brunel, founder of the Vortex concert series. Now I'm on the organizing committee for the next season of Vortex concerts. We present improvisation, modern and experimental music concerts and we're expanding to several new venues around Boston.

My husband and I traveled to the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone in October, and we've got a huge collection of photos for creating our next photography show. In August we did a New England collection and are now showing New England and Italy images at 51 Walden in Concord, MA.

The original reason for the Yellowstone trip was so I could attend the annual board meeting of the International Alliance of Women in Music. IAWM has been around a long time and promotes women composers and performers, raising awareness of discrimination in employment and programming. It has gathered resources for musicians, presenters, and teachers who want to fill in the historical gaps in the standard music histories.

So part of my contribution is to host one of several repeats of the IAWM Annual concert. On December 3, Art Without Borders will present a Massachusetts rendition of the program that was orginally presented in France in October. They had 28 loudspeakers and lighting highlighting the statues and art in the museum concert space. At the Democracy Center in Cambridge, we'll had a stereo version of the concert.

The program is:

Waterland (1990/2010) by Veronika Krausas, Canada with video
Ombrarchetto (2003) by Magdalena Dlugosz, Poland
Emergent (2009) by Carrie Leigh Page, USA
Mouthpiece (2005) by Judith Ring, Ireland
Pigeon Heart (2005) by Bernard Marie-Hélène, France
Reminiscence R2 (2010) by Ida Helene Heidel, Norway

Come on December 3, hear some fascinating music, and find out more about IAWM.

Summer Improv Ensemble

2010-06-21T10:56:00.000-07:00

I'm leading two freestyle improv workshops June 22 & 29, 2010. Here's some of the exercises we'll practice:

Warmup
One sound (from Tom Hall): Going around the group, each player plays a single sound
We can do this with a beat or without.

Direct your attention as we do this:
1. Pay attention equally to your sound and the others’ sounds.
2. Don’t think about your sound, don’t make any plans, pay attention to the rest of the ensemble.
3. Think of the sequence of sounds as a melody or phrase.

Improvise with one sound
Choose a sound. Make that your sound. That’s all you can play for the improvisation, but you can play it whenever and however you want.

Textures and grooves
Establish a texture as a group. Vary the texture in subtle ways.
Texture invention - create a texture, pause and create a different texture, and so on...

Form
Phrases, playing together - designate a leader/don’t designate a leader, statements and answers.
Use silence.
Practice recognizing an ending. Decide whether you want to finish or go on. Is that silence an ending?

Build an ostinato or a groove
One by one, play a repeating pattern.
Allow yourself to explore and practice it a bit until you settle on the pattern you want to play. The next player doesn't come in until you've settled. Don’t make it too complicated!
The next player enters and explores and finds a pattern that combines with the first. And so on…
Was the pattern solid? Did it have the momentum to keep going? Was it too busy?

Vary the ostinato
Make the pattern thinner and thinner by playing less and less of it, until there’s barely anything there, then let it grow again by adding notes back to your pattern.
Make the pattern thinner by changing your pattern to be with someone else’s pattern.

Memory training
Echo the leader - repeat whatever the leader plays
1. Single notes
2. Phrases, matched note-accurate or with the same shape or feel

Play a phrase - play something else - play your phrase again
Can we do this on a group level?

Be the leader
1. Conduct the group with gestures
2. Lead the group through a story - recite, sentence by sentence. Decide how you want to bring in the next part of the story by gesturing or talking to the ensemble. Indicate to players to enter, exit, or change what they’re playing.
3. Lead the group from your instrument. Use cut offs, upbeats, other gestures to invite the ensemble to follow your lead.

FREE IMPROV - try out ideas we’ve practiced.

Sources for these exercises include Jeffrey Agrell’s “Improvisation Games for Classical Musicians” and Tom Hall’s “Free Improvisation: A Practical Guide”.

If you're in the Boston, MA area, join us! Read more

Improv Class End-of-Semester Wrapup

2009-12-16T18:16:00.000-08:00

At the end of my first semester teaching improv class, I am smiling about how much fun it was, despite the very small class. We practiced some great ear-training exercises, like follow the leader by repeating a 4-beat snippet of melody, predictably trickier the less diatonic the melody. Another good drill we liked (which you can do by yourself at the piano), is to play a chord, then, eyes-closed, play another note and figure out by ear how it fits with the chord.

We tried techniques to break out of ruts, like putting a speech on the music stand and "playing" the speech. Sometimes our warmups were the most sensitive. Usually I forgot to turn on the recorder for the first, and best, one.

We listened to a bit of Jeffrey Agrell and friends' wonderful CD "Mosaics", which helped us open up to the idea of letting one voice have a lot of space to solo, rather than jumping in and thickening the texture with constant imitation or constant accompaniment.

I feel like I need a teacher too, to get feedback and keep out of ruts, so I've signed up for the February workshop of Music for People. I'm hoping it will be a fantastic weekend of improvising. I'd better make sure I have my horn playing in good shape so I'll be able to play as long as I want.

Black Bear Dance, first horns, then clarinets

2009-11-30T06:08:00.000-08:00

A couple of years ago, I wrote a piece for horn ensemble and community drumming group called Black Bear Dance. The notes about the piece say:

"In Black Bear Dance, I indulge my love of drumming, which really energizes the horn sound. The title comes from a line in the text for my choral piece "Weaving the World": "and black bears roam the woods unseen". The choral director rehearsed it a lot, and the image of a secret dance of bears stuck in my mind. Then on the Internet I found the Bear Dance painting of William Holbrook Beard. Aside from the fact that he was mocking stock-market bears, the image was just right."

Charlie, a friend who plays in a clarinet ensemble, suggested I arrange it for his group. At first, I wasn't inspired to make the adaptation. The mapping of parts doesn't easily match, and the piece is low-pitched - what would I do with the high Eb clarinet? And what about the drums?

Well, after a long wait, I revisited the music and was more in the mood to see the possibilities. Since there are five instruments in his group, I put the drumming rhythms into the clarinets, moving it around the ensemble so one player doesn't get bored being the drone. I took advantage of the wide clarinet range and added a few extra bits where the drums had played alone. I think the result is energetic and fun, like the original but different.

Charlie's group has the parts and they're trying it out. In the meantime, I made a virtual-instrument mockup with Quantum Leap Gold and Kontakt's Vienna Library. Have a listen (Black Bear Dance at SoundClick) and let me know whether you like it and whether it's a good simulation of clarinets.